Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

littlekorea writes "Mining companies are developing new systems for automating blasting of iron ore using the same open source physics engines adapted for games such as Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption. The same engine that determines 3D collision detection and soft body/rigid body dynamics in gaming will be applied to building 3D blast movement models — which will predict where blasted materials will land and distinguish between ore and waste. Predictive blast fragmentation models used in the past have typically been either numerical or empirical, [mining engineer Alan Cocker] said. Numerical models such as discrete element method, he noted, are onerous to configure and demanding of resources — both computing and human — and are generally not appropriate for operational use at mines. 'The problem with empirical models, by contrast, is that they tend to operate at a scale too coarse to give results useful for optimizations,' he added, noting typical Kuz-Ram-based fragmentation models (PDF) (widely used to estimate fragmentation from blasting) assume homogeneous geology (the same type of materials) throughout a blast."

THANK you, this isn't some game physics engine, its a physics engine for simulation that's commonly used for games. its also featured in blender. Its open source! that should have been in the summary for this audience.

Totally agree that the Open Source aspect should have been more heavily featured. I think the point is that they may be Open Source but initial development of the best physics engines is typically for the gaming world with other potential applications. Bullet and Newton definitely were developed with mostly gaming in mind and even ODE's creator specifically referenced gaming as one of the key areas that the engine would be used for.

I think it is accurate to say that instead of commonly, these are physi

I guess where speed and (digital) resource optimization has been the name of the game for years, so to speak, it should be no surprise that game engines have applications other than keeping neckbeards from scratching their zits.

Mostly that has to do with incorrect/inappropriate weights being assigned to gameworld objects.

Many world objects weight exactly the same as styrofoam, but somehow have enough kinetic energy when thrown to instagib the bad guy. Others are made to weigh 100x that of lead, but somehow actually get tossed by an explosion instead of simply pushed a little.

If they plug in sane values for mass, center of mass, "bounciness", elasticity, inertia, and gravity, the should get mostly useful simulations. Issues with air pressure (it is an enclosed space, with an explosive charge, after all) might cause problems, but adapting it with another added value as a delta to object vectors (with a fall off radius) would fix it somewhat.

The physics simulations are usually pretty accurate. They're limited by a few factors:
-Developer incompetence: the framework you use may be good, but if you botch it up when integrating or give it insane values like huge boulders weighting a gram, it's not gonna look realistic.
-Real-time limitations: physics is largely simulated iteratively, and thus the larger the step the worse the simulation as errors tend to appear and propagate more when the system is infrequently simulated; if the step is lowered, many problems entirely go away.
-Networking limitations: many games these days are built with the idea of a multiplayer mode, so the engine is geared towards minimizing data transmission and latency at the cost of accuracy.
-Game focus: the physics engine isn't the focus, so it's usually not given a whole lot of processing power, which once again forces approximations; it's also not unusual for things to be tweaked so that they look good, even if that makes them inaccurate, because it's a game.

I'm pretty sure you can get some fairly nice results from the better physics engines if you tweak them to match your needs.

Yep. Bullet and comparable engines rely on a great deal of cheats and fakes to gracefully maintain stability and speed. If you've just got a couple of boxes knocking around in a scene, Bullet will be pretty accurate. But when you've got thousands of small fragments colliding with each other at high velocities, you run in to all sorts of hairy problems that are better solved using more robust methods. Hopefully they will be comparing the results to the DEM simulations to verify their validity. Judging by TFA

...or approximations of it.
For this kind of simulations, there are are tools that are better, where "better" means more accurate, reliable and reproducible.
Finite elements, for example, is one of them.
Everything else is just horse manure covered with M&M's.